Data Loggers in vaccine fridges
Traditionally in vaccine / pharmacy fridges when a secondary temperature monitoring device is required practices have used a digital thermometer that would sit on top of the fridge. This is the inexpensive option and the user to check at a glance that the temperature being displayed on the thermometer corresponds to the temperature display on the digital controller. In reality many of these units are cheap, not always accurate, the probes can fracture and most importantly they don't record a temperature spike or the time at which that occurred.
For a few years now many practices with our recommendation have been switching to USB data loggers A much better and more useful option especially in the instance that your fridge has a blip or a spike in temperature. To monitor that temperature that your fridge has been running at for the last couple of hours, couple of days or perhaps over a weekend or couple of weeks you can simply plug the device into the USB port on your computer and download a graph of the fridge temperatures at the intervals you have preset. The advantage of this process is that if your fridge alarms or has a spike when you or another member of staff is not on site then you can download exactly when the spike occurred, how long it lasted for, cross reference the timeline with any possible use of the fridge for restocking or cleaning perhaps and if a plausible reason cant be identified then you may need to consult the supplier of your vaccines as to if they have been compromised.
Many data loggers can be quite expensive so here at Seal Medical we have our own, proven to be reliable, robust, accurate and surviving the test of time they are a fraction of the cost of many of the compatible competitors.